Monthly Archives: April 2016

To delegate or not to delegate – that is the question!

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Jenny with bunch of papers

I was talking to a businesswoman recently – she is successful in her field but is starting to get bogged down in the day to day running of her business. In particular, administration and bookkeeping are starting to grind and take the shine out of her enjoyment of her businesses.

This is theme I come back to time and again because it is a common story but one that has a simple solution – DELEGATION.

We may have many ‘good’ reasons why delegation is hard and why we should do all the ‘easy’ jobs in our businesses:

– it can be expensive to pay someone else

– perhaps they will do the job wrongly or prove unreliable

– it will take time for them to settle in and the process will be distracting

However, you cannot escape the truth that however much you try to ‘create’ time by managing it better, there will only ever be 24 hours in a day! There will come a point (or you may already be there) where there is simply not enough time to do all that is needed in your business.

So I would answer each of the objections above like this:

– You are much more valuable to your business than you may credit. Your time is likely to be worth much more to your business per hour than the £20-£30 per hour you might need to pay a good administrator/bookkeeper.

Also there are jobs which only you can do in your business. These undelegatable jobs include creating business strategy, and leading and managing your business (even if you work alone your business needs to be managed!). If administration and bookkeeping are keeping you so occupied you do not have time for strategy, or management, then your business will suffer considerably.

– Are you really sure you are the best bookkeeper/administrator anyway! Surely you did not start your own business to play around with the books or to file!

– If you engage a trained bookkeeper they will settle in very quickly. Also, because they already know what to do as a bookkeeper you won’t have to spend time showing them what to do.

So do yourself a favour. If you have too little time to do the important things in your business – DELEGATE!

Fiona 🙂

Scammers R Us!

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scammers
More and more scammers are out there trying to get something for nothing, and the sad fact is that it is often the elderly who fall for their tricks.

This has come to home to me in the last couple of years as my mother has fallen foul of one dodgy scam after another. First it was buying stuff she did not need at inflated prices so she would be put into a draw and win money.

Then she was bombarded by letters saying she had won prizes of thousands of pounds and all she needed to do was send £50 administration fees.

Now neither of these sound like they would be that serious but when you are talking about multiple instances it soon adds up. We discovered that she had sent more than £1500 to these criminals.

But the worst individual instance was recently when she was apparently called by the Canadian lottery who needed £4900 in tax before they could release her third prize of £265k!

It seems that however much we tell her about scammers, and how all of these schemes are bogus, she just does not seem to take it in. I think the trouble is that these scammers are so persuasive that they suspend their victims’ disbelief.

But it is not just the elderly who fall foul of con artists. It is anyone who is a little bit vulnerable, or is going through a hard time, or is just unwary – and that can apply to business people as well.

Phishing scams can be as much a problem for small businesses as for individuals and can lead to your banking information falling into criminal hands.

However, the most dangerous scam is where a fraudster contacts a business pretending to be a supplier. They inform the company that there payment details have changed and the unsuspecting business owner/employee amends the supplier payment details on their system so that any payments go to the scammer and not the supplier.

The moral of all this is that we must be extra vigilant, and unfortunately, become ultra suspicious. We also need to help our more vulnerable family members and friends to understand that you don’t get something for nothing these days (if you ever did) and not to send money to anyone just because they ask you to!